Solidarity, Justice, and Incorporation

Thinking through The Civil Sphere

Edited by Peter Kivisto and Giuseppe Sciortino

The first volume to critically engage with the pivotal insights of Jeffrey C. Alexander's work into civil society

Contributions from six internationally recognized scholars

Alexander responds by clarifying and elaborating upon the concept of the civil sphere

Solidarity, Justice, and Incorporation

Thinking through The Civil Sphere

Edited by Peter Kivisto and Giuseppe Sciortino

Description

Although many contemporary scholars have deepened our understanding of civil society through critiquing the limits of civil society discourse or seeking to offer empirical analyses of existing civil societies, none have attempted anything as bold or original as Jeffrey C. Alexander's 2006 book, The Civil Sphere. While consciously building on a three-centuries-long tradition of thought on the subject, Alexander has broken new ground by articulating a detailed theoretical framework that differs from the two major perspectives which have heretofore shaped civil society discourse. In so doing, he has sought to construct a model of what he calls the civil sphere, which he treats in Durkheimian fashion as a new social fact.

In Solidarity, Justice, andIncorporation: Thinking through The Civil Sphere, six internationally recognized scholars comment on Alexander's civil sphere thesis. Robert Bellah, Bryan S. Turner, and Axel Honneth consider the work as a whole, while Mario Diani, Chad Alan Goldberg, and Farhad Khosrokhavar offer analyses of specific aspects of the civil sphere. In their substantive introduction, Peter Kivisto and Giuseppe Sciortino locate the civil sphere thesis in terms of Alexander's larger theoretical arc as it has shifted from neo-functionalism to cultural sociology. Alexander's concluding essay responds to their analyses by clarifying and elaborating on issues in the text while simultaneously addressing recurring misunderstandings of the thesis.

Comprehensive and insightful, Solidarity, Justice, andIncorporation is an essential companion to The Civil Sphere. This compelling volume is a valuable resource for students and scholars of sociology, political science, and social philosophy.

Solidarity, Justice, and Incorporation

Thinking through The Civil Sphere

Edited by Peter Kivisto and Giuseppe Sciortino

Author Information

Peter Kivisto is the Richard A. Swanson Professor of Social Thought at Augustana College and currently Research Fellow at both the University of Helsinki and University of Trento.

Giuseppe Sciortino is Professor of Sociology at the University of Trento and a Faculty Fellow at Yale University's Center for Cultural Sociology.

Contributors:

Jeffrey C. Alexander is the Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale University and the founder and co-director of the Center for Cultural Sociology. He works in the areas of theory, culture, and politics. Among his recent books are Power and Performance, and Obama Power (with Bernadette Jaworsky). With Elizabeth Butler Breeze and Maria Luengo Cruz, he is currently organizing a volume entitled The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered: Cultural Power.

Robert Bellah was until his death in 2013 the Elliott Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He taught at both McGill and Harvard before moving to Berkeley. Landmark scholarship that defined his distinguished career extended from the appearance of Tokugawa Religion in 1957 to the 2011 publication of his magnum opus, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age.

Mario Diani is Professor of Sociology at the University of Trento and ICREA Research Professor at UPF Barcelona. He has written extensively on social movements and political network analysis, including Social Movements and Networks, co-edited with Doug McAdam. His new book, Cement of Civil Society: Studying Networks in Localities is forthcoming.

Chad Alan Goldberg is Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. During the 2013-14 academic year, he held a Distinguished Visiting Fellowship at the Advanced Research Collaborative at the City University of New York Graduate Center. His first book, Citizens and Paupers:Relief, Rights, and Race from the Freeman's Bureau to Workfare was published in 2007. He is currently working on a book tentatively titled Modernity and the Jews in Social Theory.

Axel Honneth is the Jack C. Weinstein Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and Professor of Social Philosophy and Director of the Institute for Social Research at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. Among his many publications are The I in the We, The Pathologies of Individual Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, and Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory.

Farhad Khosrokhavar is a professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France. His main fields of study are social movements in Iran, mainly after the Islamic Revolution; Arab societies, in particular radical Islamist movements in them; and Arab revolutions, to which he devoted his most recent book. He has published 18 books, three of which have been translated into several languages, and more than 70 articles in French, English, and Persian.

Peter Kivisto is the Richard A. Swanson Professor of Social Thought at Augustana College and was until 2012 Finland Distinguished Professor at the University of Turku. He is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at both the University of Helsinki and the University of Trento. His most recent book is Religion and Immigration: Migrant Faiths in North America and Western Europe.

Giuseppe Sciortino is Professor of Sociology at the University of Trento and a Faculty Fellow at Yale University's Center for Cultural Sociology. His books include Foggy Social Structures: Irregular Migration, European Labour Markets, and the Welfare State (co-edited with Michael Bommes) and Great Minds: Encounters with Social Theory (co-authored with Gianfranco Poggi).

Bryan S. Turner is the Presidential Professor of Sociology and Director of the Committee for the Study of Religion, at the Graduate Center, The City University of New York and a Professorial Fellow at the Australian Catholic University (Melbourne). Turner holds a Doctor of Letters from Cambridge University and is the founding editor of Citizenship Studies. He recently published The Religious and the Political: A Comparative Sociology of Religion.

Solidarity, Justice, and Incorporation

Thinking through The Civil Sphere

Edited by Peter Kivisto and Giuseppe Sciortino

Reviews and Awards

"Jeffrey Alexander's The Civil Sphere was an original and powerful book, exploring the cultural dimension of civil society, making explicit the normative grounding of his sociology and offering a distinctively American, non-statist understanding of multiculturalism. This book brings together some international leading theorists to explore as well as challenge Alexander's ideas in ways which illuminate the nature of social solidarity and what sociology can offer our fragmented societies." -Tariq Modood, Director, University of Bristol Research Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship

"Jeffrey Alexander's The Civil Sphere brought a career of theoretical reflection to bear on some of the biggest challenges of our era. The book's scope and ambition made it challenging, but also offered an invitation to join Alexander in trying to advance both the theory and the reality of civic solidarity. In this new book, six of sociology's leading theorists take up the challenge, Alexander responds, and the debate about civil society and social solidarity is enriched." -Craig C. Calhoun, Director and President, London School of Economics and Political Science

"This superb new volume of essays reminds us that social solidarities and popular participation are aspirational goals, not settled accomplishments, and have the potential for moral inclusiveness only in a third autonomous sphere of civil society. A consequential set of reflections on an enormously consequential work of original social theory that will serve as a touchstone of critical theory for the foreseeable future." -Margaret R. Somers, Professor of Sociology and History, University of Michigan